Message boards and Usenet
The first smiley :-)
1982
The first smiley, :-), was suggested by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, at 11:44 in the morning on 19 September 1982, on the university’s online message board. Read sideways it is a smiling face, and he suggested :-( for posts that were not jokes.
- Year
- 19 September 1982
- Made by
- Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University
- Where it started
- A message board at Carnegie Mellon University
- What it was
- Three typed characters, read sideways
- Also called
- :-), The first emoticon
The story
That week a joke on the board about mercury spilled in one of the building’s lifts had been taken seriously by some readers, and people argued about how to mark a joke in plain text. Ideas included an asterisk and a percent sign. Fahlman’s answer took him about ten minutes: a colon for the eyes, a dash for the nose, a bracket for the smile.
Within a week the faces were all over the university’s casual messages, and within a couple of months they had reached most of the universities and labs on the ARPANET, the network that came before the internet. The original post was lost for twenty years, until a search of old backup tapes found it in September 2002.
Why it matters
It solved a problem every online space still has: plain text loses tone of voice, so jokes get misread and arguments flare up. It also changed the way memes do, into winks, noseless faces, kaomoji and, in time, emoji.
Where it is now
Carnegie Mellon celebrates Smiley Day every 19 September, Fahlman’s recovered post is online on his university page, and Guinness World Records lists it as the first digital emoticon.
Sources
- The original smiley thread (Scott E. Fahlman, Carnegie Mellon University)
- Smiley lore :-) (Scott E. Fahlman, Carnegie Mellon University)
- The smiley, in Fahlman’s own words (Carnegie Mellon University, 2021)
- First digital emoticon (Guinness World Records)
- Emoticon (Wikipedia)
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.